I am running VMware player 16.1.0 on Ubuntu linux 18.04. Running VMware player will corrupt my keyboard on the host once any guest OS has started. This issue is not about trying to configure the keyboard mapping in the guest OS. This is about being able to run VMware player without it putting the keyboard into an unusable state on the host. Here are the steps to reproduce the issue.
1. Map the caps lock key on the host to act as a extra control key on the host:
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options "['caps:ctrl_modifier']"
2. Launch VMware player and start a guest. I've been testing with a Ubuntu 20.04 guest, but I don't think it matters which guest is used. You don't even need to log into the guest to see the problem.
3. Click somewhere within the login window of the guest.
4. Now move the mouse out of the window and attempt to use an application such as the terminal.
This is enough to show this problem. For me, many modifier keys are corrupt in weird ways. For example, the left shift key works, but the right shift key does not. You can also see this with the output of xmodmap:
$ xmodmap
xmodmap: up to 0 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):
shift
lock
control
mod1
mod2
mod3
mod4
mod5
This output shows nothing mapped for these modifier keys. It should show much more.
There are several workarounds to this problem, but none are ideal. It just looks like VMware is not able to honor the setting to map the caps lock as an additional crontrol on the host. VMware bug?
